Why is our Geography Curriculum so White?
Many of us teach courses that are shaped by anti-colonial and antiracist scholarship. We include readings and topics in our classes that provide our students with frameworks for better understanding issues of inequality. We have compelling ‘how-to’ stories of what it means to incorporate race, ethnicity and anti-colonial perspectives into our classrooms. We have monographs,…
How We Hurt Each Other Every Day, and What We Might Do About It
For those who do not experience their ill effects, it is difficult to recognize the ways in which a glance, a comment, something mentioned or overlooked, made invisible or hyper-visible, a seat not taken or a body too close, inflicts pain on others. For those who do experience these often subtle acts of othering, the…
The Costs (and Benefits?) of Constant Counting
I’m a 24; well, only on Google scholar (the more inclusive research “platform”). Otherwise, on Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, I’m a 12. For those fluent in the language of academic metrics you will know immediately what I am referring to: my h-index, a number that is calculated based on the subset of my publications…
Curating the AAG
Even more accurate than the first daffodil as a mark of spring’s approach is the onset of my recurring anxiety dream. It goes like this: I’m walking quickly through endless corridors, becoming more and more filled with dread as I just can’t seem to find the room in which I am about to present a…
Keeping Track of Us and Keeping Us on Track
We know a lot about you. Not that we’re spying of course, but the AAG has been keeping track of its members for quite a long time. We collect data on the number and type of geography degree-granting programs, the gender, race and ethnicity of our members, the types of jobs filled by geographers, the…
The Not-So-Silent Majority
The numbers are staggering: the majority (according to the AAUP, 56 percent) of academics teaching in American universities and colleges are contingent faculty, defined as either full-time non-tenure-track (NTT) or part-time faculty; adding graduate student teachers into the mix increases the percentage to 76 percent. The impact on higher education and on peoples’ lives is also staggering.…
Caregiving and Conference-Going
I sense what many of you are thinking: the title of this column is a contradiction in terms. Caregiving almost always means staying close to home, while conferences are about being away. For most of us, therefore, it’s difficult if not impossible to do both, or is it? Over the years the AAG and voluntary…
Geography and STEM
I knew that I had put my finger on something important when I sent out a message on a listserv and received multiple responses almost immediately and continuously for the next few days. As I’m sure most of us have experienced, our inboxes can fill up overnight with seemingly unimportant messages that are left unread.…
Toward a More Healthy Discipline
If one googles the word ‘stigma’ the definition that appears first on your screen (“a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person”) is followed, as most definitions are, by a phrase showing how that word is commonly used; in this case the phrase that google uses is “the stigma of mental…
Recognizing the Work of Graduate Students
It was a pleasure to open our Spring 2014 AAG council meeting by welcoming our new and first graduate student representative to the table. The council had agreed last year to support the idea of a graduate student representative to council; after all, graduate students comprise around 40% of the AAG membership and so having…
The More-Than-Conference Conference
Front and back of the postcards distributed by the Great Lakes Feminist Collective at the 2014 AAG conference in Tampa, FL. Courtesy of the Great Lakes Feminist Collective. I was surprised to see the line snaking around the entrance to the Past President’s Plenary at this year’s AAG conference in Tampa. Of course folks wanted…
Strategic Essentialism and Radical Intra-Disciplinarity
I’ve been an Anglophile ever since I was a postdoc at Loughborough University in the late 1980s. As you might have guessed, it wasn’t the food or weather that convinced me to love all things British; it was its geography, or, rather I should say, the fact that it had Geography. What I mean of…